During the early 80s, the video game market was in danger of dying off before it could take off. Too many manufacturers were releasing too many consoles no one cared for, and developers were making too many games that were mediocre at best. This would lead to a diminished demand for them in the consumer market as well. If that wasn’t enough, the home computer market was slowly beginning to emerge, as PCs were becoming cheaper and more easily accessible to consumers. It would be a fool’s errand for a company to attempt to reenter the market, yet Japanese developer Nintendo would jump in the market head first.
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Now Halo is hardly a game that one would consider a lost classic, but given the franchise’s popularity, and since Halo ODST hit stores this past week, now is a good time to take a look at this classic, if for no other reason than to see how far the series has come in the 8 years since Halo sold many an Xbox so long ago. You play as the Master Chief, humanity’s last and best hope against a collective of alien races known as the Covenant. Aided by your fellow crew members and a holographic artificial intelligence known as Cortanta, you blast your way through many covenant soldiers in an attempt to discover the secrets of the artificial planet/space station known as Halo.
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It’s me, the Gargoyle, with yet another Gargoyles comic review!

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Direct Link: Famicom Denshimail – Rare Games (2009/09/28)

This week we talk about the rarest thing we’ve come across — the FMC Disk Checker!

Show notes:
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I have always loved college and high school level athletics. In the place of money hungry celebrities whose egos and off-court/field antics seemingly overshadow their athletic abilities (Vick, Rodman, Owens, and about dozens of others, I’m looking firmly at you), you get young and hungry talent willing to do anything to get noticed and make it towards that next level, be it a college scholarship, or an NFL contract. This be-the-best-that-you-can mentality creates an atmosphere where anything can happen. Also, there is a certain charm in seeing local high school and college stars compete that you can’t get watching multi-million dollar celebrities, and who doesn’t enjoy watching the marching band, especially in black college football games? So it’s no surprise that I’ve always enjoyed 2K Games’ College Hoops better than its NBA counterpart. For years, developer Visual Concepts has managed to create a game that captures the atmosphere of college basketball while delivering solid gameplay on the court. That is why I was sad to learn that 2K Sports would not be renewing it’s NCAA basketball license for subsequent years, thereby putting an end to this series. To that end, 2K8 is an excellent swan song for the series. The improvements that it makes are little compared to 2K7, but they serve to refine the gameplay further.
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In addition to being the 25th anniversary of Transformers, Ghostbusters, and Terminator; 2009 is also the 25th anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Wow, 1984 was awesome.

In celebration of TMNT’s continued success, Mirage Studios wanted to do something to please both old fans and new, by producing a new animated movie. And when I say please fans, I mean they’re going to include characters from every TMNT continuity. 1987 series Turtles get caught in an interdemensional warp in the Technodrome and must team up with the comics Turtles and the 2003 series Turtles! Yes, Crisis of Infinite Turtles.

This new movie will be released to theaters for one night only on October 25, and will air on CW on November 15. A DVD release is of course expected, but I couldn’t find a date for it yet. No trailer online either. We do however have an awesome poster…
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Rock. The Blue Bomber. Mega Man has shaped a generation of gamers with his buster gun and irrepressible charm.

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Before Sega’s House of the Dead, there was Konami’s Crypt Killer. While the most recent House of the Dead game takes its inspiration from Grindhouse Cinema, Crypt Killer seems to take inspiration from the B-movies of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. You know, the flicks that made guys like Lon Cheney, Boris Karloff, and Vincent Price into horror icons. They were quite scary at the time, but by today’s standards, they are actually a bit comical. After all, the dialogue was pretty cheesy and it was plainly obvious that the horrible ‘monster’ was actually a guy in a rubber suit. Crypt Killer does a perfect job of capturing that B-movie goofiness. Even if it isn’t the greatest game ever, it’s still fun while it lasts.
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